Welcome Message from the Board of Directors

We hope everyone has enjoyed their summer. For the Reading Symphony Orchestra summer is a time to reflect on the previous season (our 83rd) and to plan for the next season (our 84th). In reflecting on our 83rd season, we are very grateful for the support that we received from our audiences, patrons, and business sponsors. It was an exciting year with three well-received concert experiences filled with energy, enthusiasm and innovation as we strove to define “Orchestra 2.0”. In particular, we are very thankful for the generosity of our donors this past year to our 10 x 10 Fund. This was a 10-month fund-raising effort that ended the season with having raised over $9000. All the support we have received is crucial for a successful season and helps ensure we can continue into the future.

In the coming season our Music Director and Conductor George Ogata will lead players and audiences alike to "innovate through disruption", while maintaining our commitment to bringing the highest quality of live orchestral music to the Greater Reading Community and to providing our local musicians with a fine community ensemble to continue their lifelong pursuit of music performance.

Our plans for this year include three unique concert experiences. Our Fall concert will feature Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.1, a piece written when Beethoven was the young new exciting composer of the Vienna music scene. Our guest artist will be pianist Ian Watson, who is recognized as one of today’s most “extraordinarily versatile and accomplished musicians”. We will complement the Beethoven with Schumann’s Symphony No. 1. Our March concert will open with the showpiece, “Bacchanale” from Saint-Saens’ opera Samson and Delilah, followed by Ranjbaran’s Seven Passages, a piece filled with “rich languid colors and pulses of striking emotional energy”. This concert will finish with the ever popular Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 4. We will conclude our season in May with a Pops concert, “In the Realms of Magic and Fantasy”, where we will take you from a “Night on Bald Mountain” to the wizarding world of Harry Potter.

So please "join the evolution" as George Ogata and the RSO bring a fresh and exciting perspective to the music that defines the symphony orchestra.